However, I think you will soon find that sitting around holding hands with city officials and bought-off "community" leaders kumbaya-style will not net you very much in the way of results.WM: This is the part that really grinds my grits. Every time some community person who has taken the leadership at one point or another disagrees or fails to jump in, that person has been "bought off." My neighbor calls it "no good deed goes unpunished." What is that about? It makes it sound like everyone should be joined at the hip.
The term "bought-off 'leadership'" is not a broad term--it refers to a specific set of individuals who have jockeyed themselves into position so that they can derive personal financial gain while appearing to "help" the community but while actually serving the interests of the power elite in maintain the status quo. Do you doubt such people exist? 'Cause I guarantee you the community knows all about them. They are the very reason Chief Olson and others have slush funds.
"Kumbaya-style," in this context is really insulting. What does that mean? That interacting with the powers that be is a Corky no-no for those who are opposed to police beating on people of color? That if you go down to city hall you have to snarl at the mayor and the chief and the council to let them know you're serious? At some point, someone has to go down to city hall and beard the lions in their dens. And kumbaya, by the way would never be my choice, it's kind of a dirge. I'd go for show tunes, much peppier.
I'm not sure I understand the term "Corky no-no." My point here was that there is a notion among a lot of left/progressive/liberal folks that if we just go down to city hall and show the city leaders the error of their ways, everything will magically change. Well, reality check. This is politics and sometimes nice works but sometimes it doesn't. We have to have more tricks in our bag then that. You have to understand various folks' vested interests in the way things are and use that understanding in selecting your strategies.
By the way, to the best of my knowledge I've never snarled at anyone at city hall and I've been down there plenty. Sometimes we've presented policy papers that show why, for example, the plan for the CRA put together by the Civil Rights Dept wouldn't work or why the police department has become less diverse under Chief Olson. Other times, we've packed the council chambers with folks holding signs during key council votes. Yet other times we've held rallies on the steps of city hall to demand change. We've packed the courtroom for key legal cases. We even served legal papers on the city council once while they sat in chambers. None of this involved cozying up to the power structure nor did it involve snarling. But it was effective strategy for what we were trying to accomplish at the time.
What we didn't understand was that the revolution is five minutes while the evolution from that revolutionary spark seems to take forever. And there are set backs, many of which have to do with revolutionaries who cannot entirely contend with the changes they wrought themselves and other set backs ensue from those who resist the changes.
But if you're going to play this revolution by alienating your supporters as sell outs who make nice with the power, then you're going to be forced to go it alone and meet resistance at every turn.
We must be doing something right because every week our organization seems to get bigger and bigger. Our supporters are people who have been brutalized by police or family members of people killed by police who come together to work for justice in their individual cases as well as to act together to make change. None of them are getting money to maintain the status quo. As for people who get paid to maintain the status quo, I don't see them as our constituency and, in fact, see them as acting against the interests of our constituency. To the extent that they do, they will need to be taken on.
You talked about how people in Minneapolis derive from a homogeneous culture and have difficulty with changes to that culture. When I moved here about 10 years ago, I heard the term "Minnesota nice." Perhaps the great umbrage you express about my words has less to do with the truth of those words and more to do with how they upset the local cultural norm, regardless of whether that norm remains functional or helpful.
Michelle Gross
Bryn Mawr
TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.)
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